Is Research In Motion still, well, in motion? Heck yeah they are. They just unveiled their long-awaited tablet, christened the BlackBerry PlayBook. It's got a dual-core 1Ghz ARM processor, and it runs... QNX! This alone already makes it the most awesome tablet ever.

We've covered the lawsuit between Skyhook and Google in quite some detail already, but today we have something very interesting that sheds a lot of new light on the case: an interview with Skyhook's CEO and founder, Ted Morgan, about the lawsuit. While Morgan obviously couldn't talk about everything, he explains a few things and gives some new information, as well. Read on for Skyhook's side of the story.

The PlayStation 3. For a long time, it was a rather well-protected machine, and it wasn't until early this year that George Hotz finally managed to crack the thing wide open. In essence, it was now possible to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 like you would jailbreak your iPhone, but of course, Sony wasn't pleased. With the recent firmware update, v3.50, Sony went from surgical precision to the battle axe - they blocked all non-Sony USB devices controllers (and a lot of PS2 > PS3 controller adapters) from working.

Microsoft has "set up and removed" having Windows 7 Service Pack 1 as a prerequisite to running (or, more correctly, "installing") IE9, in the space of just 2 days.

Well, this certainly isn't particularly surprising. The rising popularity of Android leaves more victims in its wake than just Windows Mobile. Sony Ericsson, one of the major manufacturers of Symbian phones (other than Nokia) has just announced it will pretty much abandon the platform to focus entirely on Android - leaving Nokia as the sole person cheering for team Symbian.

Oracle has made some decisions about Java: in order to release JDK 7 in the middle of next year, they have decided to change priorities and specifically, postpone three features: Jigsaw, Lambda and Coin.

So, we have the iPad out and about for a while now, doing its thing, most likely selling well. Of course, others want a piece of that pie as well, so we see tablets pop up all over the place, most of which are either ultra-low budget junk or vapourware (how that's Adam coming along, Notion Ink?). Earlier this year, Steve Ballmer proudly held up HP's Windows 7-powered Slate - but then, HP bought Palm, canned the Slate, promised a webOS tablet, and then resurrected the Slate as an enterprise product. Now we have a video of the Windows 7-powered Slate. Let's compare it to Samsung's detailed overview of its Galaxy Tab, and see ever so clearly why HP canned the darn thing in the first place.

"I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but Windows 7 shipped around the same time I got married, and it includes a fascinating new technology called HomeGroup. Its goal is really simple: get all your home computers sharing documents, media, and printers with each other, in a way that is both secure and straightforward. But Microsoft also has a deeper aim here: they're trying to finally kill off the decrepit NetBIOS technology that's at the heart of most Windows sharing problems. So let's have a look at HomeGroup and the technologies involved that make it work. And just to keep things interesting, we'll compare HomeGroup with what Mac OS X offers."

As I was casually browsing around today, I came across this blog post. It's about the recently released VLC media player for the iPad, which you can use to play just about any video under the sun on your iPad. The blog post is a complaint about a bit of help text that's not properly rendered inside the application - annoying, but no dealbreaker. Until I actually read the text - this is how you're supposed to get content on your iPad?

After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time. Although it's a little more than nine months since Qt's last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, Qt Quick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released

"Luca Barbieri made a rather significant commit today that adds a state tracker dubbed 'd3d1x', which implements the Direct3D 10/11 COM API in Gallium3D. Luca says this is just the initial version, but it's already working and can run a few DirectX 10/11 texturing demos on Linux at the moment. This is not a matter of simply translating the Direct3D calls and converting them to OpenGL like how Wine currently handles it, but is natively implemented within Gallium3D and TGSI to speak directly to the underlying graphics driver and hardware. Thanks to Gallium3D's architecture, this Direct3D support essentially becomes 'free' to all Linux drivers with little to no work required."

Big Content, which already owns the Obama administration, is at it again - I guess mandatory monitoring software to scan every computer's content isn't enough. A bi-partisan proposed bill would allow US federal courts to issue injunctions that would order domain registrars or registries to cease resolving the domain name of a copyright infringing website.

Who says the open source and Free software world only copy but never innovate? Over at Canonical's design blog - you know, the company which does nothing for the Linux world *cough* - someone named Christian Giordano has shared some ideas about how Ubuntu - and therefore, the rest of the Linux world - could make use of hardware sensors to better serve its users. Pretty interesting stuff.

"What would Benjamin Franklin have thought about P2P file sharing? We'll never know, but a new book portrays him as a skeptic of intellectual property and an advocate for the common ownership of inventions and ideas." What a surprise. A person with brains favouring loose IP laws. Anyone with two braincells to rub together understands that a free flow of information and knowledge is beneficial to human development.